Meet the Designer Behind the Space Age Interiors That Will Soothe You This Summer

Early this month at Barneys in Beverly Hills, Prada was reimagined as a pachinko parlor, Fila created a pop up pizzeria, Gucci established an ephemeral roller rink, and Abby Dougherty, a 28-year-old interior designer and installation artist created a low-fi moody dreamscape for Barneys’ “Evening Ready” collection of glittering clothes and accessories from the likes of Miu Miu and Versace.

The young up-and-coming artist better known as Neon Saltwater has built a steady Instagram following through her digital renderings of pale, empty rooms erected in geographic grids and glossy marble, with fluorescent lights bouncing off of their reflective surfaces as if Dan Flavin works were installed in white-washed Ettore Sottsass buildings. Dougherty’s amassed audience includes art and design behemoths like Matthew Mazzucca, Barneys’ Creative Director, who DMed her with an invitation to join the Los Angeles flagship’s all-star lineup for The Drop LA. Amidst the better known celebrity attractions, her resulting fantasy bedroom became one of the most photographed sections of the week-long activation, with shoppers striking poses on a purple metallic mattress beneath a gleaming sign reading “You’re the One,” and a shoe shelf backlit by an intense faux sunset—a constant in Dougherty’s digital and real-life installations. “My theme is always the relationship between something so beautiful and sad at the same time,” says Dougherty over the phone from her home in Seattle, where, today, she opens a new show, “Summer Dreams,” at Winston Wachter Gallery.

Here, another impossibly beautiful sunset flanks an arcade game and a table filled with blue juice bottles, wrapped presents, and bowls of candy. The falling light stokes visions of vacations past and future, the end of a thrilling day (in this case, a birthday party), and always, a sense of longing. “If you’ve ever seen a beautiful sunset and you’re alone, and you wish someone you loved could see it with you—I’m kind of obsessed with that feeling.”

It’s no surprise that Dougherty strikes a chord with a digitally-raised generation. Her name, Neon Saltwater, was taken from the title of a playlist she created during an especially emotional long-distance and doomed relationship. In spite of geographical barriers, texts, emails, and songs shared in a digital space fostered an especially deep connection that could never be realized IRL. But for them to “meet,” the Cornish College of the Arts-trained interior designer created a digital oasis: a room at golden hour with two glowing tubs of high-octane water. Its structure came naturally. “I have very vivid dreams of architecture. It’s a pretty trippy experience, they’re so real in my head. The architecture is always very clear.”

Dougherty kept going, posting her first digital renderings on Instagram in 2015 and founding the movement Room Wave, a broader category defined as ”environments that make you feel inexplainable emotions, false nostalgia, dreamy haziness, and euphoric loneliness,” and a riff off of the instant associations her fans drew to the Vaporwave music genre celebrating ‘80s and ‘90s subcultures. Digital rooms, she found, were much more satisfying to create than designing physical spaces with found objects. “[My] interior design is limited by what exists in these big box furniture stores and antiques. I was bored by those limitations. I want to design the furniture and every single detail, things that are complete fantasy.”

A window casing might be inspired by the grand and lonely rooms of the 1974 movie version of The Great Gatsby; a back-lit frosted glass wall could be influenced by the futuristic sci-fi of Blade Runner and The X-Files, bubble gum color schemes lifted from episodes of The O.C. and Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen’s neatly resolved vacation movies. “Life could never be as good,” she recognizes, though with an ever-growing global following, nominations to work alongside the world’s biggest fashion designers, and well-funded partners like Barneys who are able to turn her imagined furnishings into reality, Dougherty’s real life is looking a lot more picturesque.